This reminds me of Drupal 8 which was a massive departure from previous versions. As a part-time Drupal user with a handful of sites. The changes in Drupal 8 were just too much for me. Suddenly I had to learn Composer before I could do anything. Nothing wrong with Composer but if you aren't fulltime PHP developer this is just too much to learn to use a CMS. Installing Drupal changed from just unzipping a file to a whole convoluted process (I know I exaggerate).
The technologists were happy but the hobbyists not so much.
Composer mostly replaces 'drush make'. You can still download zip files (for core, themes and modules).
Composer helps if you have to manage complicated modules. For example, CiviCRM is CMS-agnostic and bundles its own versions of Symfony, Guzzle, etc. If we only used zip files, we would end up with library conflicts. Composer helps fix that.
(However, I agree that Drupal tends to make things insanely complicated, and the upgrade process is underwhelming.)
The technologists were happy but the hobbyists not so much.